Airports and love – it sounds like the beginning of a Hallmark movie, you know, the romantic movies where girl meets boy and there is some conflict, but they get together in the end? Rhoda, a missionary kid, is the star of this show. She shares in her essay about meeting her husband and how raising two TCKs was not quite what she imagined.
I met my future husband on a blind date at Geneva Airport. We had been corresponding for a few months. I was working for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) in Oxford, UK, and I was looking for some volunteers to proofread documents translated from English into French. He had worked for the Swiss IFES movement a couple of years prior, and a colleague had suggested I write to him.
We hit it off immediately. I found out he was working in Congo for a big humanitarian organisation. We knew many of the same people from his time at IFES. As his passport was tied up with Visa procedures, I jumped on a plane while he was on break in Geneva. This was 200. He disabled his attachment setting on his email because of Internet issues where he was working. He didn’t have my photo, and he didn’t know what I looked like. As soon as I had seen the photo he had sent me, I thought ‘how am I going to keep up with this guy?’. He looked like an adventurer from an Indiana Jones movie.
The day we finally met, my plane was late, and he spent over an hour trying to figure out which lady coming out at Arrivals was me. At first, I walked around and couldn’t find him, then I tapped on this man’s shoulder and said: ‘Are you Olivier?’ he said yes, and we spent the whole weekend talking. The next few months were spent taking planes back and forth to see each other. We got married in December 2005.
Airports and airplanes have been a feature in our marriage for 20 years. When we went to New York in 2013, every time we visited my parents in France or the UK, his parents in Switzerland, my brother in the USA, and friends around the world.
In March 2020, when I took my husband for the last flight out to rejoin his team in Kabul before they closed the airports due to COVID, it was the first time I struggled with airports. For once, planes were taking him away from me and our two boys, and with no definite plan for flying back. I had a moment of panic. When would we see each other again? Eventually, it was a UN plane that brought him back to us the first time, and then subsequently with an Airline that was still flying. Those goodbyes were poignant, and airports became difficult places.
What a joyous reunion at Zurich Airport when he flew back to us for the final time in July 2021. Six weeks later, the four of us were at Geneva Airport with our suitcases and two cats, flying out to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for my husband’s new four-year posting.
Our two boys are pros at air travel, and I love that they know their way around an airport. Our eldest (now almost an adult) was only a few weeks old when he took his first flight. This past January, our 13-year-old and I travelled to Switzerland to visit schools in preparation for our move this Summer from Kyrgyzstan back to Switzerland. At baggage claim, I told him I was going to check on SIM cards, he volunteered to get the bags. Within a few minutes, he arrived with our two suitcases like it was nothing. I was so proud.
Planes are my favourite technology. They take you to places that would have taken you months to get to, and they bring you back to family to sit by a bedside in a hospital when there’s an emergency. My mother is becoming frailer as she grows older, and I am grateful that we are moving closer to where she lives. She will still be a plane ride away, but this one will be 1h15, a mere hop compared to the 6h+4h hour flights we currently need to reach her.
Last Sunday, I landed in Geneva again. It feels like a full-circle moment. Who would have thought 20 years later, I would come back to the same airport where we first met, about to turn 50, and about to start a new chapter.
There will surely be more trips from Geneva airport and from other airports. Goodbyes and Hellos to my husband as he ‘commutes’ to his posting in another country, and to say goodbye to one of our boys as he sets off on his own adventures. Without airports, we would not have led the life we have, and our boys would not have access to that life either. As much as airports have witnessed our tears and joys, they have been gateways to extraordinary, life-changing moments.
I told our boys recently that when they are adults, we will likely not all live in the same country, considering our family history. Our eldest laughed and said: ‘You and dad are probably the ones who will keep moving!’. He’s probably right. But whatever they decide, whether to never move again because being a TCK has involved too many goodbyes, or whether they decide to embrace a globally mobile life too, I know that airports will feature greatly in our family life. We are too dispersed already, with aunts and uncles and cousins on different continents. And I haven’t even been to Armenia yet to visit my mother’s heritage.
Rhoda Bangerter, half Middle-Eastern, half British, grew up in France as a missionary kid (MK). Married to a Swiss for 20 years, she’s lived in Geneva, Bern, New York, and Bishkek. In 2019, Rhoda’s husband left for a non-family posting in Afghanistan, and she stayed in Bern with their sons. She now specialises in the impact of Frequent Work Travel and Split Family Assignments on employees, their partners and their children. In Summer 2025, the family is returning to Switzerland, and her husband is set for another non-family posting.
Author of ‘Holding the Fort Abroad’ www.rhodabangerter.com
